For my first TEI assignment, I worked on Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”. I had never read this short story before, and Poe is not the most clear author of all time. By marking up any type of writing, the encoder will gather a deeper understanding of the text by noticing certain words, researching ideas, etc. Personally, marking up the text while reading it required me to read closer than I would have normally. I defined words that I did not know rather than skipping them over because of the unknown importance of the word. I also noticed how this piece of writing differed from other texts that I had marked up in the past. My section of “The Pit and the Pendulum” was lacking persName altogether, which in other texts is very prevalent. I noticed how common state and trait tags were becoming in my markup. These were aspects that I would not have taken notice of had I not been the encoder of the text.

The encoder also has the distinct responsibility to decide what will be included in the markup and what will not. As Pierazzo wrote, “informed decisions need to be made on what to include because it is relevant and what can be safely omitted” (Pierazzo, 467). It is up to the discretion of the encoder of what to include, and with “The Pit and the Pendulum” I thought it would be most relevant to markup more state and traits than objects because of the tone of the text.

The Declaration of Independence assignment called on a different side of TEI mark up. This required more research on the part of the encoder than it had with Poe. Due to this, it allowed the encoder and reader to better engage with the text. Prior to my markup on Roger Sherman I did not know anything about him, not even that he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Rather than the reader just acknowledging a list of names who signed the Declaration of Independence, they can gain insight into the lives of each man and learn facts such as where he was born and the name of the college he attended. While some of these facts may seem pointless, it is still better to have more knowledge of something than less, and a project like this will make that available.

Ultimately I believe that engagement similar to the ones with Poe and the Declaration of Independence are extremely helpful to better understand the text. As Rasumssen wrote, “reader roles are a function of how we manipulate and interpret an edition’s texts, and so fulfilling each role involves action at two levels: the level of manipulation and the level of interpretation” (Rasmussen, 128). The text is in the hands of the encoder. What they include and what they omit is up to their discretion, but even simply making these decisions engages the encoder with subject matter more intently.

I have done TEI work in the past and I found the Poe work to be very challenging. A certain element of the difficulty I faced was in the text itself. There are not a lot of nouns in my segment; my whole piece was basically adjectives describing Usher and his madness. The lack of nouns were a challenge because it is so much easier to mark up, for example to tag “dog” than “trepidancy.” With all the adjectives, I assigned them tones for what I thought matched both their meaning and their use in the sentence. For example, Poe uses the word “spirit” a lot and switches between using it as synonymous of the mind and actual spirits or ghosts. I had to closely read the sentence and the greater paragraph and even the piece as a whole and make an executive decision as to what Poe meant. This decision-making about context relates to what Piezarro says about digital editions:

“We should simply say that the notion of objectivity is not very productive or helpful in the case of transcription and subsequently of diplomatic editions and that we should instead make peace with the fact that we are simply doing our works as scholars when transcribing and preparing a diplomatic edition.” (Pierazzo 466).

As a scholar working on the piece, I decided what I thought was most important and based my tags on my research of the text as well as the context of the narrative itself. As Piezarro says, we have to distance ourselves from the notion of objective truth- our editions will be inherently subjective and we can’t be stuck on trying to make it “correct.” This is exactly what I did- I adjusted my knowledge and did the best that I could to make a scholarly edition. Going even further than that, it can be argued that there is not much room for objectivity in markups of literature as literature is inherently meant to be read in several different ways.

Poem section of my part of the House of Usher

For the Poe segment, my most used tag was <desc type=”despair”> since so much of the piece was about the narrator describing his poor friend turn madder and madder. In hindsight, the abundance of dark, or strange adjectives shouldn’t have surprised me given that Poe is known for these tones. Another interesting part of my chunk was the poem at the end. After looking up TEI guidelines, I decided to mark the poem according to its rhyme structure and number the lines. This was a little bit tricky because I had to do a bit of research to figure out the poem’s rhyming and other poetic devices.

The Declaration of Independence segment was much easier than the Poe work. It was more straightforward as we had a template to fill out and it was considerable shorter. Additionally, I had a lot of background knowledge on my signer, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, because he was from my home town. The most qualitative part of the markup or the most customizable aspect was the event tag. That was a little challenging for me because Carroll did so much in his life worth meaning. However, I decided to pick the qualities that made him different than the other signers. For example, he was the only Catholic signer and the longest lived/last to die out of all of them (died at 95 years old). I also included a fun piece of knowledge I recently learned (from researching the history of my town for another class); at 92, Carroll laid the first stone of the B&O railroad (America’s first railroad) and thought that that moment was more important than his signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Carroll was heavily involved in politics and civil activities. He didn’t retire from public servitude until he was 90 and even after he came out of retirement to participate in important state events.

In definitely believe that TEI markup helps you better engage and understand the piece you work with. It forces you to do research and ask questions about the piece; like what does this word mean and how does it relate to the context of the story or even simpler, is a bed a place or an object? As Rasmussen says: “Do we read digital editions or use them? The answer is obvious: we do both” (Rasmussen 133). This quote correctly states the complex interaction with digital editions or close readings. For the Poe work we both read the piece and used the context within it to inform our tagging. It was a little less clear in our work with the signers as we didn’t base our work on the actual text of the Declaration of Independence, but rather used the Declaration as a medium to provide biological information about the signers. However, it could be argued that we are “reading” the signer and based on the knowledge we gathered on their life, we made decisions as to what we thought would be useful or intriguing information for users looking at our published work online.

I believe that this kind of engagement with text helps us better understand the subject matter. Relationships between characters, places, and objects are better understood.

The work with Edgar Allen Poe and the Declaration of Independence assignments were vastly different from each other. Edgar Allen Poe wrote the “Tell Tale Heart,” and, instead of factual information, was creative writing. Therefore, using this to the best of my knowledge, I needed to know mainly, persNames vs. roleNames and objectTypes vs. placeNames. This is a challenge I had before when writing about James Merrill Linn. I had decided to make “old man” a roleName, even though, originally I had him as a persName. He was one of the main characters besides for the narrator, but because they never referred to him as his surname or forename, he “old man” played just a role in the story. Also, at the beginning of the poem, this man was referred to as “old man” and as the poem progressed, he was referred to as the “victim,” which inherently I also made a roleName. Because this character took on so many different states in the poem, he was a very transient character, so he experienced many shifts in roles.

“Tell Tale Heart” EAP TEI markup

Another difficult part of marking up the “Tell Tale Heart” was distinguishing some objectTypes vs. placeNames. I ended up calling “floor,” a placeName rather than an objectType; the murder occurred in a bedroom and the victim was on the floor. The location of the victim was the floor, and I consider a location a place. People may disagree with this aspect of my mark-up style, but it is just a personal stylistic choice that I have made.

Working on the Declaration of Independence piece, I found it more tedious but more straightforward. We were given instructions one what was to be included and did not have much freedom in the style of our markup. I completely understand why this was the way it was. Because we were working on a collaborative document, there needs to be a sense of uniformity. On the “Tell Tale Heart,” I was working alone, so the stylistic choices I had made did not affect other members of my group. As Pierazzo writes, “two scholars, given the same transcriptional criteria, are most likely not to produce the same transcription of the same exemplar” (465). For the second assignment, our works had to be cohesive. Also, especially because it is a historical document, it is important to only state factual evidence and facts. We were not working on a creative piece but rather a straightforward historical document.

Text markup during the “Tell Tale Heart” was much more about objective information and organizing the text into categories. During this markup, we had to be careful to make sure that it was just a “revision” of the original text and work. The “Declaration of Independence” text markup was more about providing information in a manner that was independent from other information in the work. When doing the “Declaration of Independence” project, we were essentially creating new work based off the old work, because we were adding new information. As Rasmussen states, “still, the boundaries are fluid here; only concrete individual assessments can determine whether it is appropriate to speak of a new work” (122). So, was are “Declaration of Independence” project a new work? Or was it just a new “edition”?

I have never been worked with a language like TEI. In my mind, computer science languages like Python and Javascript are objective. If I want to achieve a certain functionality, I use specific grammars to do it, and the boundaries for different grammars like list and dictionary are really clear. However, for me TEI is kind of a confusing language. First I need to read the whole document, and then mark up any important elements by using different tags.

Since don’t have background with TEI, I used the TEI website a lot to make sure that I used appropriate tags when marking up both of the text. Even I tried to mark up as accurately as possible, there’re still some places I don’t know which tag to use and thus I chose the tag I think is the most appropriate. This could be potentially problematic, since like in Python, I’m able to test whether I used the correct thing or not, but in TEI as long as it’s a green box in the upper right corner, I have no further information. In the Poe text, first I marked up all the diplomatic elements using for example, <emph></emph> to show author’s emphasis on words here “__word__”. Then I marked up other elements like using <persName><persName> for a person’s name. At first this was very hard for me, since basically have no understanding about what tag should I use, so for a person’s name, I used <name type = ‘person’></name> at first. The only information I can get for TEI is basically from its website, which has some examples for each tag, but the explanation is not really detailed. Therefore I thought <name type=’person’> is appropriate here. However, after I’ve asked the difference between those two tags in class, I realized that “name” here is like a assigned tag not like the real person’s “name” we usually used in our daily life, so I had to change all my markups. For the Declaration of Independence the mark up process is different. Basically I was researching about a signer Samuel Chase on Wikipedia, and add the relevant information to the template. I think this is much easier since all the tags are provided so that I don’t have to consider that much about which tag to use as for Poe.

Figure 1. Mark up for Declaration of Independence

Figure 2. Mark up for Poe

I do believe that my searching for the appropriate tag to use on TEI website familiarizes me with TEI and helps me to better understand the subject matter. In this process, I become a co-worker of the text according to Rasmussen. “The co-worker seeks to go beyond the user and reader roles, and to contribute actively to the scholarly enterprise. This could consist of making annotations, reading proofs, adding encodings, or contributing in other ways to the site’s total production of knowledge.” During the close reading and encoding process, I made notes, did extra research and annotates the text based on my understanding, which will definitely help me to understand the subject matter. The intended target for the Poe text should be general readers, but it’s used scholarly as we were marking up the text. When creating the digital edition, the editors must have noticed and made their editorial choice to keep a limited number of elements. This might let us not able to understand and decode all text correctly, but it’s unavoidable like mentioned in the Pierazzo. “Digital editors must consider the needs of the users when preparing their publication and, in consequence, considerations about what kind of users to expect and how to meet their needs have become a common concern for any kind of digital publication.”